The Gothic begins with later-eighteenth-century writers' turn to the past; in the context

of the Romantic period, the Gothic is, then, a type of imitation medievalism. When it was
launched in the later eighteenth century, The Gothic featured accounts of terrifying
experiences in ancient castles — experiences connected with subterranean dungeons,
secret passageways, flickering lamps, screams, moans, bloody hands, ghosts, graveyards,
and the rest. By extension, it came to designate the macabre, mysterious, fantastic,
supernatural, and, again, the terrifying, especially the pleasurably terrifying, in literature
more generally.

When the Gothic made its appearance in literature, Walpole was again a chief initiator,
publishing The Castle of Otranto (1764), a short novel in which the ingredients are a
haunted castle, a Byronic villain (before Byron's time — and the villain's name is
Manfred!), mysterious deaths, supernatural happenings, a moaning ancestral portrait, a
damsel in distress, and, as the Oxford Companion to English Literature puts it, "violent
emotions of terror, anguish, and love." The work was tremendously popular, and
imitations followed in such numbers that the Gothic novel (or romance) was probably the
commonest type of fiction in England for the next half century. It is noteworthy in this
period that the best-selling author of the genre (Ann Radcliffe), the author of its most
enduring novel (Mary Shelley), and the author of its most effective sendup (Jane Austen)
were all women.

The stock characters of Gothic fiction include tyrants, villains, bandits, maniacs, Byronic
heroes, persecuted maidens, femmes fatales, monks, nuns, madwomen, magicians,
vampires, werewolves, monsters, demons, angels, fallen angels, revenants, ghosts,
perambulating skeletons, the Wandering Jew and the Devil himself.

A gothic novel prominently features elements of horror, the supernatural, gloom, and
violence: clanking chains, terror, charnel houses, ghosts, medieval castles, and
mysteriously slamming doors. The term "gothic novel" is also applied to novels that lack
elements of the traditional Gothic setting but that create a similar atmosphere of terror or
dread. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is perhaps the best-known English work of this kind.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) was inspired, as Shelley explains in her introduction
to the edition of 1831, by a communal reading of German ghost stories with her husband
and Byron during bad weather on the shores of Lake Geneva. Frankenstein is the single
most important product of this Gothic tradition, but it considerably transcends its sources.
Its numerous thematic resonances relate to science, poetry, psychology, alienation,
politics, education, family relationships, and much else. Even so, one cannot imagine a
more archetypically Gothic circumstance than the secret creation of an eight-foot-tall
monster out of separate body parts collected from charnel houses.